At the end of each season it’s time to clear out the old stock and bring in the new. This is especially annoying at this time of year when stores feel compelled to clear out the winter boots, which are only just becoming useful, to make room for racks of bathing suits and other summer accoutrements that won’t be needed by most of us for at least another five months. Herewith is my contribution to the year-end clearance sale.

1. Today I turned exactly 511,209 hours old. Of the useless things you can learn from the internet, this ranks right up there with what Kim Kardashian wore to the basketball game. Except of course learning how old you are in minutes (30,673,023 in case you were interested). Far too many of those minutes were spent doing things that definitely did not get me closer to enlightenment, earn me any money, or add any other tangible value to my life. Airport security lines, I’m talking to you.

2. I have seen various non-congruent data points with respect to the amount of the internet that is dominated by cats – 15% of content, 15% of searches, 15% of waking hours etc. The fact that the ‘15%’ number recurs frequently makes me rather dubious that anyone really knows how much internet real estate cats are (literally) sitting on and even more importantly, why cats and not dogs or some other animal. The answer is of course that dogs try too hard.

3. Somebody (or a bunch of somebodies) was able to land a space vehicle on a moving comet earlier this year. This indeed would qualify as rocket science. Given the amount of things that are not considered rocket science that didn’t get done, like deciding what kind of transit a ‘world class’ city should have, there are many people out there not pulling their share of the weight. Sign me up for a spot when they colonize that comet. It’s got to be more civilized than this place.

4. Shiloh Jolie-Pitt now wants to be called John (I assume the Jolie-Pitt part still stands). I think this falls into the category of uber-1st world problems. Maybe even the most ‘soggy baguette-cold latte (no it wasn’t meant to be an iced cappuccino)-scratched my new iPhone’ of all first world problems. This one takes a bit of analysis to fully dissect though. First, I think any jury of my peers (but perhaps not a jury of Angelina’s peers – and does she even have a full jury of peers even available on this planet? We may need to go to the comet for that one) would consider ‘Shiloh’ to already be a gender neutral name, if gender identification is your concern. Second, in the Jolie-Pitt universe, I would think that John is also a non-gender specific name. So it is very unclear what objective the child-previously-known as Shiloh is trying to achieve. No doubt all will be revealed in next month’s National Enquirer.

The one true way to figure out you have too much stuff is to pack up to move. All of those things stuck way in the back of the kitchen cupboards, in that place over the fridge or in the blind corner cabinet were probably never very useful to begin with, otherwise they wouldn’t be stored in the most inaccessible place possible. Or if they were useful, they have been replaced and you now have two of them because the item in question couldn’t be found when the need for a fish spatula, 5 litre casserole dish, or pot du crème pots urgently arose.

There seem to be two parallel planes existing in kitchens: the abundance one and the scarcity one. It does not seem possible to have a feast without a corresponding famine. And in my kitchen the famine manifests itself in lids, especially the lids for things that are completely useless without a lid. Like storage containers. Every so often I go through the storage area designated for storage containers and throw out the ones that no longer have lids. I have no idea where the lids go and I have never found a lid that is missing a container. I am certain that even if I pack only containers that are fully functional, when I unpack them at the other end somehow lids will have disappeared along the way.

While my containers are busy ensuring their obsolescence, my casserole dishes are busy multiplying. There is some justification for having several different casserole dishes because it is generally not advisable to make a soufflé in a lasagne pan, but that is not the primary reason for casserole dish sprawl. I think the blame for this situation lies squarely in the (recently deceased) lap of S. Donald Stookey.

Mr. Stookey, who died earlier this month just short of his 100th birthday, was the accidental inventor of Fotoceram, or the material that brought us CorningWare. Apparently Mr. Stookey chose his career at Corning Glass because he was fascinated by glass and the attempts of alchemists to harness a material so unique that it is not quite solid, liquid or gas, but rather a liquid frozen in an unstable state. Which kind of explains the number of mismatched glasses I own.

Anyhow, CorningWare’s claim to fame is its indestructibility, or in the immortal words of the commercial “from the freezer to the fire, CorningWare cookware can do it”. Or at least most of the time. I have personally proven that neither Pyrex nor CorningWare nor its spinoff Corel is impervious to smashing to smithereens on a ceramic floor or imploding when moved from a hot stove to a sink full of ice (seemed like a good idea at the time). But I digress. My experiments aside, casserole dishes hang around for a long time and stay perfectly good much longer than our willpower to resist buying that brand new 6 piece set that comes in bright red. So the avocado green versions migrate to the back of the cupboard. Too good to throw out.

I have not rented anything since about 1987, until now that is. I have discovered that re-entering the rental market in 2014 is kind of like re-entering the dating market if you have been off the shelf for a few decades. In fact there are many similarities.

1. The photos (or lack thereof). As you know, photos today are essentially free, as demonstrated by the 112 vacation pictures people post on Facebook to document their long weekend in New York. So this tells you to be very cautious if there are very few photos available of your intended target. Only one head shot on Lavalife? This is someone who is not at their best from the neck down. Only a photo of the outside of the house (with snow on the ground)? Take it from me that the interior is not at all ready for its close-up.

2. The photos (or truth in advertising). There may indeed be several photos available. On a dating site they might show participation in sporting events, someone standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, or walking on a beach. However, there is usually no indication that these photos are actually recent. And like on a dating site, the goal of looking at rental listings is to actually see the potential candidate in person without too much delay. That’s why it’s generally not a good idea to go with photos that are several years out of date. Or those that have been airbrushed beyond recognition. This will not help you get a date (or maybe it will help you get one date) nor will it help you rent your flat.

3. The background checks. Google has revolutionized the background check. Who among us has not Googled someone prior to meeting them? Granted, Google doesn’t tell you everything but perhaps the most interesting finding is when you can’t find anything at all. Be afraid, very afraid. When researching a rental property though, you can find out whether it was recently for sale (but not sold), an indication that it may well have a for sale sign on the lawn in the future, which does not bode well for a long term tenancy.

4. The solvency checks. No one wants to date a deadbeat and I get that any landlord wants to know you can pay the rent. The problem is if you have been out of the rental market for some time (and out of the mortgage market for some time) you have a hard time proving you are good with paying monthly tithes. So you need to produce your entire financial history on short notice. And an employment letter. And a banking reference. No matter that we just sold the house for three times what we paid for it. Whatever happened to the ‘looks good, I’ll take it’ era? I think it is alive and well in 1987.

5. The personal references. Honestly, it is easier to get a Nexus card and a Russian visa than rent a place. (Note to self: did I put the possession of a Nexus card and prior possession of a Russian visa on the rental application? Surely that would hold some weight…). Please, please, please, if anyone calls you to ask if I am responsible, credit-worthy, not associated with the Hell’s Angels, bathe more than once a week, do not cook curry on a regular basis, and will not even be in my rental unit for more than 2 hours a day – the answer is yes. I’ll pay you later. Namaste.

It seems like no one is ever happy these days. I think we can blame this on Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, although apparently he never depicted his theories in pyramid form. But I digress. Maslow theorized there are basic and essential needs that must be met before we can turn our attention to more esoteric things like self-actualization. Until we are fed, clothed and housed we can’t think of anything else. Then we need to be confident we won’t lose our hard fought corner of dirt before we can begin to form lasting social relationships (Israel and Palestine anyone?). Once we have peeps to hang out with, we can start to turn our attention to competence and mastery of some skill and yes, status seeking.

I think, though, what’s gone wrong is that Maslow never anticipated what would happen when people and societies started to zoom up his pyramid in record time. What happens is preoccupation with first world problems like whether to build subways or LRTs. This is such a huge problem that I doubt it can possibly be solved within my lifetime and certainly not before I will be entitled to a discounted transit pass. In Toronto, several iterations of local government have decided and undecided what to do so many times that we could have been crisscrossed with subways and LRTs several times over by now. It seems the essence of the dilemma is that subways are expensive and slow to build and LRTs are cheaper and faster to build, which wouldn’t seem like much of a dilemma to most of us. But of course we are in the first world where we view the issue a little differently. Subways are a hallmark of ‘world class-ness’. Subways zip under the ground, leaving the cars full reign of the streets. And of course the people who are in the position to potentially maybe possibly decide to get on with building transit of some description don’t actually use it.

And if you need more examples of first world problems you need go no further than the ads you see every day. For example, did you know you can buy a winter cover for your plastic outdoor storage box (you know, the one you use to store your outdoor living room and probably your outdoor kitchen accessories, which are different than your backyard pool accessories – of course those go in the pool house or in the cabana). And speaking of winter, when you go shopping for replacements for the gloves you bought last year (this year’s black is a little more indigo than last year’s, which had touch more magenta) make sure you buy a pair that is certified as ‘touch screen’ compatible or you will be perpetually freezing your fingers off while tapping out that important text (OMG its soooooo cold!!!!!!!).

But perhaps the most epic of first world problems that has come to my attention lately is the one that has been recently solved by Vitamix. As its website attests, “Vitamix is one of the most trusted brands in high performance blending technology”. Vitamix’s claim to fame is that its two horsepower engine could do double duty as both your lawnmower and leaf blower. It is indeed a ‘luxury’ blender, starting at only $499. As you can imagine, a Vitamix blender has some heft to it – eleven pounds to be exact. It also takes up a fair amount of real estate on the kitchen counter, and anything that big is capable of churning out kale smoothies by the truck load. Fortunately, the folks at Vitamix have felt our pain. The new ‘personal’ Vitamix tops in at 15 inches high to fit under our kitchen cabinets! The new ‘personal’ Vitamix can blend a single (20 oz or close to 600 millilitres) serving in a portable container! And if that doesn’t meet your need for food, belonging and self-esteem all for the introductory offer of $409 (plus shipping, handling, lifetime warranty and recipe book), I don’t know what will.

It wasn’t only bad news for oil on the Stock Markets this week, it was also very bad news for Barbie. Apparently retailers are still clearing out dusty Barbies from last year’s Christmas season, leading to a 21% drop in global sales this quarter, which is the fourth straight double-digit decline. And of course as Barbie goes, so does the fortunes of Mattel, which had a corresponding 22% drop in profit and a stock price decline of 38% so far this year.

Barbie has been under the cloud of controversy several times, but I am prepared to cut her some slack since at 55 it would be more alarming if she hadn’t ruffled some feathers in the course of her relentless fame. As far as I know there is no definitive (or any) Barbie biography or autobiography out there. Perhaps since she appears poised on the edge of doll retirement it might be time to publish one. Here are some of the facts that are likely to be revealed in a Barbie tell-all.

1. Although she has been referred to by one name much longer than either Cher or Madonna, her full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts. She quite wisely quickly ditched the Millicent part (I’m not sure a Milly doll would have caught on quite so quickly).

2. Barbie apparently did attend High School but the details are rather sketchy. Was it Willows High in Willows, Wisconsin or Manhattan International High School in New York City? Some investigative reporting is clearly required here.

3. Despite her dubious educational qualifications, Barbie has about 150 jobs on her resume, spanning from registered nurse to rock star, veterinarian to aerobics instructor, and pilot to police officer. This works out to about 4 jobs per year if we assume she started working as a model at age 17 and means her resume falls far short of being able to be contained on 2 pages. It also begs the question of who keeps hiring her knowing her half-life will be 3 months on average.

4. Barbie has run (unsuccessfully) for President of the United States six times since 1992. I guess this shows perseverance if nothing else. She could probably also claim to be Sarah Palin’s role model in more ways than one.

5. Barbie also claims to have gone to the moon as an astronaut four years before Neil Armstrong (see Sarah Palin). Although she does hold a pilot’s license and spent some time (I would guess three months) as a flight attendant, this is clearly such a fabricated claim that I hope it has been purged from her current resume.

6. In her most recent grandstanding effort, Barbie said she was on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue this year. In fact, her PR people struck some kind of deal to feature her on an ‘overwrap’ of the real cover, which presumably had girls inside who were at least somewhat less plastic. Good try Barbie.

I rode on a berserk subway train the other day. At every stop the woman inside the PA machine issued a different Cassandra-like announcement: “this train is delayed due to weather” “this train is delayed due to mechanical difficulties” “this train is delayed due to signal problems” “this train is delayed due to passenger illness” “this train is delayed due to smoke at track level” etc. There are several things I find disconcerting about this experience, not the least of which is that these announcements came through clear as a bell, something that never happens in an actual delay. Here are some other things that occurred to me.

1. Somebody somewhere must have made a list of all of the reasons a train might be delayed in order to have these pre-recorded announcements handy. I can imagine there must be hundreds of different reasons why the subway would grind to a halt. Things like “this train is delayed because some jerk held the door open” or “this train is delayed because a mouse got stuck inside the wheel well’. I picture a room full of men (because only men would care about this kind of thing) generating the list of disasters then arguing about which ones are sufficiently disastrous to make the final finite list.

2. Probably a different somebody somewhere has to choose the most appropriate reason for any given delay from the vast collection of reasons. I can imagine that sometimes this is difficult. First, because you have to get the announcement on right away so there is some pressure to press the right button quickly. Second, because there may be some nuances of the delay situation that require choosing between several related messages. For example, “this train is delayed due to flooding” versus “this train is delayed due to water at track level”. This type of stress must surely command a huge salary.

3. The amount of effort being spent on obsessing about telling us about delays would indicate that the transit system believes that delays are an inevitable and even a normal occurrence that will continue to persist. I respectfully suggest that spending more cycles on preventing the delays than explaining them would be a better use of the time.

4. Actually, why is it even necessary to communicate exactly why our subway train has come to a grinding halt mid-commute? The only information that has some value is when (or whether) the train will move again. Which is also the only information they never seem to be able to accurately tell us, or if they do, it is impossible to hear it.

5. There is yet another career path that has passed me by: dire announcements announcer. Or actually, pre-recorded dire announcements announcer. Imagine being able to do all of your work without needing to do anything or be anywhere? You literally ‘phone it in’. Nice work if you can get it.

Last week I went down to the freezer in the basement to look for something to cook for dinner. It turns out I am more in the habit of putting things into the freezer than taking them out, since the package of meat – at the top of the pile, by the way – was dated November 2007. Or old enough to ride a two wheeler without training wheels. That’s kind of the problem with freezers. Stuff disappears into their frosty jaws, never to be seen again except when it is way past time to throw them out.

I suppose it makes us feel prepared to have things in the freezer. You never know when you might need to assemble a meal without time to go to the store, that is, if you are better at freezer management than me. It also makes us feel prepared for the fall or the winter or whatever ravages of weather might prevent foraging and harvesting fresh food. There is of course a flaw in this logic. Typically any event that would interfere with sourcing food would also mess with the power grid and prevent both the ongoing preservation of frozen food and the ability to cook the rapidly defrosting mystery meat. This is especially true at the cottage where several brushes with freezer meltdown have relegated the cavity above the fridge to mostly storage of ice cubes (ice puddles?) and bread that in a worst case scenario would be ideal for stuffing.

But the freezer, along with the refrigerator, are things that have rescued us from the drudgery of preserving fresh food to tide us over the non-harvest seasons. However, like many of the core household maintenance skills of the past, canning and preserving has recently experienced a resurgence in popularity, probably driven by those same retro-loving hipsters that have rediscovered the sewing machine.

And truth be told, I have also secured a seat on the preserving band wagon. As long as you aren’t trying to deal with bushels of fruits and vegetables, it is a very satisfying thing to create your very own jam and pickles with ingredient lists that don’t require a degree in chemistry to decipher. The problem is the average home jammer will still produce many more jars of stuff than is possible to consume in a year. That’s partly because each jar is a little work of art that is hard to stop admiring. And hard to open because then the pristine jewel-like contents will be sullied by toast crumbs. But even more because who can actually eat all of that jam and trot out all of those pickles? So what we end up doing is giving it all away. You’re welcome.

Apparently the freezer was invented in 1748 by William Cullen and at that time he couldn’t figure out a practical use for it. I think William Cullen was right.

How was your summer? That’s the question this time of year and perhaps the most telling part of the ‘how was your summer’ question is that it is never asked about any other season. I’m just never sure what the right answer is. Is it the same as answering ‘how are you’ where the questioner really doesn’t want an answer other than ‘fine thanks’? Probably. I don’t think they really want the details about my mosquito bite tally, my soggy flower bed, or my neglect of kayaking. And what they really don’t want to know is, regardless of how cold or wet or otherwise suboptimal, I hate, hate, hate the end of summer. One problem is that I am always a year older and unfortunately that issue will remain until I am no longer around to complain about it. The most obvious issue is of course the start of the painful slide towards winter. However, since I don’t otherwise get the chance to answer the question with the degree of detail it deserves, here is really how my summer was.

My summer started with a dead Rhododendron. Okay, technically the deadness of the plant actually preceded June 21 and could probably be traced back to one or more of the arctic vortexes that descended in January and February and March and maybe even April. Anyhow, that meant one of the few redeeming features of my front yard did not make an appearance this year. The black knot on the chokecherry tree is doing just fine though, thanks for asking.

This year I hung Boston ferns on the porch rather than something with flowers. I’d like to say this was in anticipation of the very fern like weather that showed up this summer but I’m not that smart a gardener. No, my fern foray was really because of being out of town for about six weeks in a row, including over the May long weekend, a time period that corresponds to the availability of summer plants. But this actually worked out well in the long run because aside from the fern success, I picked up some sad looking deeply discounted mystery flowers that turned out quite well. And next year I won’t buy anything before the middle of June either.

I can tell that the turkeys had a very good summer. They showed up (or more correctly, showed themselves) the first week in May. There are seven or eight of them and they walk up the path to the cottage with an air of entitlement and seem to enjoy horrifying the cats. I’m not quite sure what they do or where they go for the balance of the summer, but come the beginning of September they show up again, crashing through the bush and cutting a swath from one side of the island to the other. Then they are gone until next year, at least between Thanksgiving and Easter if they know what’s good for them.

Anyhow, the water was quite swimmable until it wasn’t but I swam anyway. The weather was okay except when it wasn’t. The power stayed on except when it didn’t. And the summer wasn’t very summery. But how can it be over already?

There is something about four in the morning for my cat, especially when he is at the cottage. His internal clock says, no matter how comfortable his sleep on my bed and no matter how dark it is outside, it’s time to go out and roust out the creatures of the forest. Earlier in the summer it is in fact almost light at the cat witching hour but not now. I know you might say that I am an idiot not to chuck him out before I go to bed. I tried that the other day, however with the windows open a cat outside sounds very much like a cat inside, and since I had forgotten how smart I had been at bed time, I got up and went down to let him out, only to let him in.

But the good news is that I always know what time it is when Dennis wakes me up. That’s because chances are the power has flicked off for a nanosecond at some point in the night and some number bearing no relation to the actual time is flashing on the clock. This is somewhat understandable if there had been a thunderstorm or wind storm that was violent enough to bring down wires or take out transformers.
However, if that had happened I think it would have woken me up.

One night last weekend when Dennis and I played our little game, the power was alive and well at 4:15am. When I got up once again at a more civilized time to greet a flawless weather day, I didn’t actually know what time it was because the power had gone AWOL. And it continued on its (literal) sabbatical for the balance of the day while repair crews searched for the errant weak link in the grid that had no apparent cause.

This week, when there were ample reasons for outages, it only went off at very brief intervals. Brief enough and random enough intervals to lure me into playing whack-a-mole with the stove, microwave and coffeemaker clocks. Which leads me to one of the great mysteries of the 21st century in terms of technological advancement, or lack thereof: the inability for manufacturers to standardize on things that seem quite simple to the average person. For example, is it really necessary for every digital device to have its own proprietary power supply requiring an equally proprietary charging device? And of course the one that you need is at home when you need it at the office, or in the car when you need it at home or broken. But I digress. Back to the subject of clocks.

In Mr. Maytag’s world you set the time by pressing the ‘Clock’ key (with a picture of a clock on it), selecting morning or afternoon (1 for am, 2 for pm), entering the correct time of day, then pressing ‘Start’. Not all that unreasonable. But when we move to Mr. Hamilton-Beach’s world things start to go a little sideways. He thinks the most logical way to set a clock is pressing the ‘Settings’ button three times to get to the ‘clock’ option, entering the appropriate hour, pressing OK, entering the appropriate number of minutes, pressing OK again, then selecting morning or afternoon (3 for am, 6 for pm), then pressing ‘Start’, at which point the number of minutes is no longer accurate. And at which point I decide to give up on all but the one clock that never stops: Dennis.

John Venn of the eponymous diagram turned 180 this month, or at least reached the 180th anniversary of his existence. In case you were wondering, he didn’t call his diagram a ‘Venn diagram’ but Eulerian circles and that’s because he sort of ripped them off from Euler who had his own version of a Venn-like diagram. Fortunately this didn’t cause too much outrage at the time because the diagrams kind of languished in obscurity until the early 1960s, when we were inflicted with the new math. I did not know this at the time, but there was a very logical reason for injecting more logic into math education. According to the internet, the reason behind our childhood trauma was the success of the Russian Sputnik satellite program. In order to counter the threat of the intellectual prowess of Soviet engineers, we all had to pull up our collective mathematics socks. Just one more example of a small group of people ruining things for the rest of us, but I digress.

Here are some other observations about Venn diagrams and the new math.

1. That whole thing about learning the ‘base this’ and ‘base that’ number systems (that is, anything other than 10, the number system we actually use) was all the fault of new math. By using number systems more complex than our own, we were supposed to understand the nature of numbers better. Unfortunately it didn’t contribute at all to our ability to add and subtract.

2. In grade 1 and 2 we had a math aid called rods, which the internet tells me are more correctly called ‘Cuisenaire rods’. This is what happens when a violinist treads into math territory (see above re spoiling things). Anyhow, these rods are a set of 10 coloured sticks of varying lengths that represent all of the numbers between 1 and 10. I guess the zero, widely considered the one of the most important inventions in mathematics, was not considered important. However, although these rods were supposed to “expand children’s latent mathematical abilities in a creative and enjoyable fashion” they fell into disfavour in the 1980s, probably partially due to the propensity for six and seven year old boys to use the ’10′ rod as a weapon.

3. You can download a template for a Venn diagram from a website of educational support materials. I am tempted to say that if you are teaching Venn diagrams and don’t know how to construct one without a template (circle, meet circle) perhaps you should find a different line of work. But I’ll just keep that thought to myself.

4. Despite the downfall of the new math, virtually everyone knows what a Venn diagram is. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that if you draw one to illustrate a point everybody will understand what you are talking about. The bad thing is sharknado.